There has been a war of ideology between what we consider ‘spiritual’ and what we consider ‘technological.’ People talk about the human race evolving into two different species — those who believe in God and those who believe in Progress.

But this binary is a false distinction that is changing now, and bears more consideration.

On one side, the experience of the spiritual is by definition beyond ordinary life. It is mysterious, sacred, not possible to reduce to anything our human minds can wrap themselves around.

There is a part of me that doesn’t want to figure it out or have it explained . . . ever. I’m happiest as an inner space cosmos-naut, exploring the awe and feeling it in my body; sharing the incomprehensibility with others in a field of Big Love, knowing myself to be divine. The inner space place never ends. Every time I find myself in some paradigm shift on my spiritual journey — that is myself, the world and everything changed — when the sparkles clear and I look around, I notice there is a whole new realm of exploration and wonder across the open Field beckoning me to explore it.

Mystics say we can travel to the edges of the cosmos and beyond to parallel universes. OK, I’ll confess I’m just a wee bit curious about how it all works.

On the other side, technology is everywhere in ordinary life. In many ways, technology IS ordinary life. Technology starts with something crazy that we’ve figured out and then we manufacture something with it for our use. Yeah, I know it’s often applied to weapons and war, but I like to think most of it goes toward making devices and creating systems that make our lives easier, more expansive, more comfortable.

First scientists think and experiment and hypothesize, probing into what could be possible. They experiment and must prove reproducible results that can be confirmed as true by others. Then designers, engineers and entrepreneurs figure out how scientific theory can be applied, or made useful. And just when I get acclimatized to some new innovation that blew my mind not too long ago, something else crops up on my radar, promising to blow my mind yet again.

Take fusion energy, for example. This is a technology that has been in my awareness for some time, but I’ve never known that much about it. But last month I went to see The Story of Everything, a performance by MIT nuclear physicist-turned-slam poet Kealoha, and was mesmerized by a new vision of possibility that fusion energy could unleash by providing a viable source of unlimited clean energy.

Harnessing the nuclear reaction of the sun and stars here on earth.

Crazy?

I wonder.

Mystics are the scientists of the spiritual. They have always probed into the interiority of our humanness to see what is there and how invisible realms work. They bring back information and perspectives that their devotees practice, confirm, and pass along. With the mixing of cultures come the mixing of spiritual paradigms and practices. What works best sticks around — we call it perennial wisdom.

Spiritual practices, from meditation to prayer to drumming to trance dancing to plant medicine, are technologies. They make the spiritual experience accessible to our ordinary minds, with the ultimate goal to make our lives easier, more expansive, more joyful by waking us up to who we really are, beyond the small identity of personality. Modern science is birthing new spiritual technologies today.

There is a part of me that loves science. I especially keep up on science that has to do with consciousness and the brain, our latest undiscovered frontier. I’ve been riveted by research currently being done by scientists like Dr. Jeffrey A. Martin who, along with others, are researching personal transformation (or spiritual development) by studying neural correlates of states and stages of consciousness — particularly those states (stable, persistent experience) of awareness that have traditionally been called ‘enlightenment.’

Right now, scientific research is pointing to the possibility of not only a future of unlimited clean energy, but also technological assistance for enlightenment.

Does that make your brain splatter all over the wall and sparkles come out of your skull? Well, it did me when I watched the videos below and began to understand what was going on.

At the recent Trans Tech (transformative technology) Conference in Palo Alto, California, there were several scientists who presented their research in brain stimulation for generating persistent non-dual states of consciousness (the scientific term for enlightenment).